The use of tasers has increased since the Toronto Police Service equipped nearly 400 front-line officers with them, though the majority of deployments don’t actually lead to the weapon being discharged.
Last February, the Toronto Police Services board decided to expand the use of conducted energy weapons (CEW) by equipping select constables with them.
Previously, only a few hundred sergeants were equipped with conducted energy weapons. That created a situation where front-line officers would have to call for backup if they required the use of one.
A quarterly report that will be considered by the board today, reveals that 361 constables are now trained and equipped with conducted energy weapons.
The report says that the group deployed their conducted energy weapon on 100 separate occasions from May 15 to August 14 of this year. Sixty of those uses did not actually involve the discharging of the weapon and only involved an officer producing it as part of a demonstration of force. Another 13 of the deployments did involve the full use of the weapon while five involved its use only in “drive stun mode.”
The report said that the use of the conducted energy weapon was effective in gaining control of a subject in 87 per cent of the deployments.
“This is the highest demonstrated force presence ever recorded by the TPS and can be attributed to constables choosing to display a CEW in lieu of resorting to empty-hand techniques to resolve a potentially volatile situation,” the report states.
The report found that front-line officers were more likely to only produce a conducted energy weapon as a demonstration of force than sergeants.
Among the 413 sergeants equipped with a CEW, it was fully discharged about 46 per cent of the time and used as a demonstration of force 50 per cent of the time. The other four per cent of occurrences involved the use of the weapon in “drive stun mode.”
The report said that the difference can likely be attributed to the fact that sergeants typically respond to calls “after other means of resolving situations have failed.”
The report also looked at the type of situations in which officers elected to deploy a conducted energy weapon. It found that nearly 40 per cent of conducted energy weapons deployments, either by sergeants or constables, involved a person deemed to be in crisis.
The weapon was fully discharged on a person in crisis on a total of 12 occasions and used in “drive stun mode” another five times over the reporting period. The other 35 uses were only as a demonstration of force.
The board’s mental health sub-committee will be given an opportunity to provide an opinion in the expansion of the conducted energy weapon program and its effect on people with mental health or addiction issues but have not done so as of yet.
The report says that of the officers equipped with conducted energy weapons over the last quarter, two were sent for “remedial training” due to their use of the weapon.
Today’s meeting is being held at 1 p.m. at police headquarters on College Street.
